Stop Asking Coaching to Fix Everything
What executive coaching can do, what it can’t—and where organisations get it wrong
This article forms part of No Shortcuts, IMI’s limited content series exploring the capabilities organisations depend on most—and why they cannot be developed overnight. It draws on a recent conversation with Fabio Grassi, Programme Director IMI’s Professional Diploma in Executive Coaching
Executive coaching has become firmly embedded in organisational life, and beyond. But as its popularity has grown, so too has the range of things organisations expect coaching to solve.
A struggling employee? Get them a coach.
A leader finding a role difficult? Coaching.
A team struggling inside a dysfunctional system? Perhaps coaching might make them more resilient.
For Fabio Grassi, an executive coach with more than 1,500 hours of coaching experience and Programme Director for IMI’s Professional Diploma in Executive Coaching, some of these expectations misunderstand what coaching actually is.
“Coaches don’t fix the problem,” he says, which opens up a series of interesting questions about coaching: where its power really comes from, when it is the wrong intervention and whether organisations are always prepared for what happens when it works.
A coach is not there to give you an answer
Let’s say someone has a difficult problem. They sit down with an experienced coach. Surely the value lies in the coach telling them what to do?
“In executive coaching, the client is the owner of everything that takes place,” says Grassi. “The coach is just the facilitator.
“The ownership sits with the client of what the outcome is, what decisions are made. The process sits with the coach.”
And even though an experienced coach is likely to have encountered a similar problem before, simply handing that answer across can undermine the very capability coaching is intended to develop.
“Saying that ‘I would do this, or I would do that’ – that doesn’t really work,” says Grassi.
Instead, it’s about helping the client to see what they can learn from another perspective and how that changes their own thinking.
Unlike mentoring or consulting, coaching does not transfer ownership of the problem to an expert; it returns ownership to the person facing it. If the person paying for coaching expects an expert to diagnose the problem and prescribe a solution, they are buying the wrong intervention.
Although Grassi believes “everybody can be coached,” not everybody arrives ready to be coached: part of the process may involve becoming comfortable with the idea that the client themselves, rather than the expert opposite them, ultimately has to own the judgement.
A session can work without producing a breakthrough
Understandably, there may also be an expectation that every coaching session should produce an identifiable breakthrough. But this is not how Grassi thinks about success.
“I never really look at it as a single coaching session success,” he says.
Yes, sometimes a client reaches an immediate insight or makes a decision or leaves knowing precisely what they need to do. Other times, an hour can feel less conclusive.
“It can feel almost like we have spent an hour just allowing the client to talk,” says Grassi.
But this doesn’t mean nothing happened.
“The fact that the session is finished doesn’t mean the client has stopped thinking. We may have set in motion something.”
For Grassi, creating the space in which somebody can think differently can itself be the intervention. However, this idea can sit awkwardly with organisational cultures generally preoccupied with speed, measurement and immediately demonstrable outcomes.
Yet there is evidence that slowing down can itself improve performance. In a field experiment involving employees at a business-process outsourcing company, researchers found that workers who spent the final 15 minutes of their training day reflecting on what they had learned performed 23% better in the final assessment than colleagues who spent that time continuing to practise.
The researchers described the distinction as “learning by doing” versus “learning by thinking”: experience produced more value when people were given time to make sense of it.
In other words, not every important developmental process produces its return inside a 60-minute meeting. Sometimes the question is still working long after the conversation has ended.
Sometimes the person is not the problem
Imagine an employee struggling with relentless change or contradictory priorities or an unhealthy organisational culture, if not all of the above.
The instinct may be to help that person become more “resilient” and “adaptable,” because the instinct is usually to focus on the person rather than the system.
But what if the system is the problem?
“There is always a system at play,” says Grassi. “We think that we can resolve everything by doing certain things like coaching and training. But one particular approach to development doesn’t really help an organisation to change completely.”
Coaching cannot be separated from organisational context, and a coach should help an individual understand not only themselves, but how the surrounding organisation is affecting what they are trying to achieve. But one isolated intervention cannot compensate for dysfunctional structures, incentives or leadership.
According to Grassi, culture, development, strategy and the wider organisational system need to connect. “There has to be a very coordinated structure,” he says. “A systemic approach.”
While coaching can help somebody navigate a difficult environment and help them to understand what they control, where they can influence and how they might respond differently, it cannot absolve leaders of responsibility for fixing the environment itself.
In fact, used badly, development risks becoming a way of individualising organisational failure: demanding people become more “resilient” while overlooking whether the system they are being asked to endure should change.
So instead of asking, “Why is this employee struggling?”, perhaps leaders sometimes need to ask, “What are we asking this individual to adapt to?”
Successful coaching can mean someone leaves
Sometimes greater clarity produces an outcome the organisation paying for the coaching may not have expected. When Grassi works with someone inside a deeply dysfunctional environment, it’s not unknown for people to finally realise: “Maybe this is not the place for me. I need to go somewhere else.”
Now, you would be forgiven for thinking this sounds like a failed investment. After all, if an organisation funds executive coaching and the person subsequently leaves, where is the return?
Grassi challenges that assumption, and notes that recognising a fundamental mismatch may be better for both sides than keeping someone in an environment in which they are unhappy, disengaged or unable to contribute effectively.
“It’s much better economically to let that person go,” he says. “So there is something of a win-win in any case.”
Of course, coaching can also produce the opposite response, where the individual decides to become a catalyst for change.
“They realise what the situation is and they might actually take the courage to take the steps that might make a change,” says Grassi.
Either outcome exposes something important about genuine development. Yes, an organisation can create the conditions for insight, but it cannot insist the insight reached will always be the one most convenient to the organisation.
So before commissioning coaching, leaders should reflect deeply and ask: are we genuinely prepared to develop people if we don’t control where that development leads?
Coaching should not become a substitute for management
Too often, we look at coaching as a way to fix somebody that’s broken, notes Grassi. “But in reality, nobody’s broken.”
Coaching can certainly help somebody develop their performance, but that doesn’t make it a substitute for performance management.
“When somebody is actually not engaged with the whole process,” says Grassi, “That’s a performance management issue that a manager should be able to address.”
Coaching should never be offered simply because it is easier than having a difficult managerial conversation. While a coach can create reflection and challenge assumptions and support somebody to develop, they cannot remove a manager’s responsibility to set expectations, address behaviour and make decisions about sustained underperformance.
Sometimes the answer is coaching and sometimes the answer is management, but confusing the two usually means doing both badly.
A sectoral interlude
The above distinction between coaching and managing is particularly important in sectors where leadership cannot rely primarily on direct authority or financial incentives.
Public administration is an obvious example. Senior public servants routinely work across departmental, professional and institutional boundaries where progress depends on influence and cooperation as much as hierarchy.
OECD research on public-service learning cultures describes an emerging shift from the manager as the “smartest and most knowledgeable” person in the room towards managers acting as coaches who enable autonomy and development. Nineteen OECD countries also report offering tailored coaching to senior public leaders.
Public-management research points in a similar direction. Studies of public-service motivation have repeatedly found that mission, relationships and leadership practices matter alongside—and sometimes more than—traditional financial incentives. In one study of 3,754 Swiss civil servants, socio-relational factors were important to motivation while material incentives played only a limited role.
In environments like these, coaching is not simply about making an individual “better”. Its value may lie in developing the ability to influence without commanding, surface perspectives without owning them and create commitment among people the leader cannot simply instruct
Trust does not mean making the client comfortable
Coaching depends on trust. But trust is sometimes misunderstood as creating a relationship in which the client feels endlessly supported or affirmed.
Grassi notes the opposite is often true. However, he notes that “people will not take – let’s call it ‘tough love’ – unless they trust you.”
The quality of the relationship creates permission for challenge, but this starts with the coach demonstrating authenticity and confidentiality and clarity about the boundaries of the relationship, even when clients ask the coach directly for the answer.
Tell me what to do.
While Grassi may have a view, giving it is often precisely what he must resist.
“I can actually tell you what I think might be a way to go about it,” he says, “But it’s not going to help you. I actually need you to work out where you’re going.
“People need to be able to see themselves through the conversation. If they are waiting for something to come from the outside, it’s not going to really have an impact.”
The strongest coaching relationship, then, is not necessarily the one in which the client always leaves feeling reassured, highlighting why trust is so important to build from the outset, especially in a workplace environment where trust cannot be assumed.
PwC’s 2025 Irish workforce research found that 60% of employees trusted their direct manager, but only 46% trusted top management. Great Place to Work’s 2025 Irish benchmark similarly put “high-trust leadership” at 59% across the average Irish workforce, compared with 85% in organisations ranked among Ireland’s Best Workplaces. Trust also appears to become more fragile as organisational distance increases.
Coaching works in the opposite direction: it depends on proximity, confidentiality, consistency and a relationship strong enough to withstand challenge. But it’s that safety to challenge that demonstrates – and depends on – trust being present.
“I did a course. I’m a coach now.” That isn’t enough.
As coaching has expanded, Grassi believes the profession itself must mature, recalling an academic validation discussion in which someone compared coaching with established professions such as law, medicine and pharmacy.
Each of the above has clear professional expectations. What, Grassi was asked, is the equivalent for coaching? The question stayed with him.
“Anybody could say, ‘Oh, I’m a coach. I did a course there and I’m a coach now,’” he says. “This is not enough anymore.”
Grassi notes that becoming a serious coach involves continuing professional development, ethical judgement, practice and feedback and, crucially, supervision.
Why supervision?
Because coaches bring themselves into the room too, according to Grassi.
“We have to assume that we are humans,” he says. “As a coach, we are not really superhuman. We are just human.”
A coach can have insecurities and assumptions and experiences that overlap with those of the client.
“What happens when my problem meets the client’s problem?”
Supervision allows the coach to interrogate what may be happening inside the client’s relationship, consider ethical dilemmas and recognise when their own reactions risk interfering with the client’s work. Expertise in coaching therefore includes something paradoxical, as the coach themselves can sometimes become part of the problem.
For organisations commissioning coaching, that raises its own question: what evidence of professional development, supervision and ethical practice should they expect from someone being trusted with their senior people?
Your coaches may know something about your organisation that you don’t
The confidentiality of coaching is fundamental. But what happens when multiple coaches are working across the same organisation?
Over time, notes Grassi, patterns can emerge.
Because coaches earn significant trust with their clients, Grassi says, “we actually get to understand better some of the inner workings, the mechanisms that are underneath the surface.”
“If you have a number of coaches that have worked with people and they actually start seeing patterns arise, now can actually bring back those patterns without compromising the confidentiality.”
Grassi believes supervision could potentially play a role here, acting as a filter between the confidential experience of individuals and wider organisational learning.
Organisations already invest heavily in engagement surveys, pulse checks and people analytics. Yet rich organisational intelligence may already exist inside developmental conversations. If five senior leaders independently encounter the same structural obstacle, the organisation may have learned something more important than whether any individual coaching engagement met its original objective.
AI can give us answers. What happens if we stop thinking?
And then there is AI.
Here, Grassi’s concern goes far beyond whether an AI system could one day replicate some elements of a coaching conversation. In fact, he readily acknowledges its capabilities, considering AI can sift huge volumes of information, identify patterns and produce plausible answers incredibly quickly.
His concern is what happens to the human using it.
“What I think is the most damaging part of AI to society at large and to human development is the fact that it allows us not to think anymore,” he says.
“I don’t have to think through. I don’t have to go and research. I don’t have to go and read. We are outsourcing our thinking to a machine.”
It’s a concern researchers are beginning to examine. A 2025 Microsoft Research study of 319 knowledge workers found that greater confidence in generative-AI was associated with less reported critical-thinking effort. However, the researchers did not conclude that AI eliminates critical thinking; rather, it appears to change its nature, shifting more effort towards verifying information, integrating responses and overseeing the task.
Similarly, Grassi isn’t arguing that people or organisations should refuse to use AI, and acknowledges that abandoning AI is hardly a viable option. Instead, he suggests that another capability may become increasingly important:
“Maybe we should develop a new skill which is about challenging AI,” he says, which brings the conversation back to the central purpose of coaching.
Much of technology’s promise rests on removing friction: faster analysis, faster information, faster answers. But coaching often does something very different.
It refuses to supply the immediate answer because the process of working through the question—challenging assumptions, examining different perspectives and reaching your own judgement—is itself developmental.
This is also a useful counterpoint to an organisational instinct that often equates more activity with more productivity. Marketing guru and founder of Ogilvy’s Behaviour Science Unit Rory Sutherland has made a similar argument from a behavioural perspective: there are circumstances in which the value lies precisely in the time, effort or friction involved, and where automatically assuming “faster is better” can make us less intelligent rather than more efficient
Something for leaders to reflect on: that in our collective obsession with speed and efficiency, perhaps some friction should not be designed away.
No shortcuts
Executive coaching is powerful precisely because it cannot do everything.
It cannot make a dysfunctional organisation healthy, nor can it relieve managers of the responsibility to manage. It cannot guarantee that somebody who develops greater clarity will decide to stay, and it should not promise to hand people answers they need to learn to develop for themselves.
What it can do is create something increasingly scarce in modern organisational life: space to think.
Grassi returns to what he believes people most need to unlearn about coaching.
“Stop thinking about coaching as a fixing tool,” he says. “It doesn’t fix anything, but it does create a sense of space and a sense of resourcefulness.”
In an age increasingly defined by speed, automation and instant answers, that distinction will likely become more important rather than less.
The shortcut would be to provide the answer.
The development lies in helping someone become more capable of finding their own.
No Shortcuts explores the interconnected capabilities that allow organisations to turn ambition into performance and individual potential into collective progress. Across conversations on leadership, management, executive coaching, and strategy and innovation, the series examines what these capabilities look like in practice—and why developing them requires more than exposure to ideas alone.
